Saturday, March 5, 2016

Obituary: John Power 1930-2016

Award-winning film director John Power spent his childhood watching film after film in his grandfather’s Prince’s Picture Palace in Maitland. He would often sneak away to watch the latest Hollywood movie and newsreels.

Those afternoons in the late 1930s and early 1940s shaped his career as a journalist, and producer and director of more than 30 documentaries, dramas and feature films, including Like a Summer Storm, Billy and Percy, The Picture Show Man, A Single Life and The Dismissal.
John Beresford Power was born on November 20, 1930, in Maitland, the youngest of four children to William “Bish” Power, a pharmacist and Gallipoli veteran, and his wife, Ethel (daughter of the cinema owner, Lou Prince).
Happy to leave his Marist Brothers’ school at 16, Power started as a cadet journalist with the Maitland Mercury.